U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,951 discloses a three-dimensional imaging method that registers relatively deformed first and second volumetric images of an object which may be obtained from different imaging modalities and/or at different times by performing an elastic geometric transformation on one of the volumetric images. The method includes extracting first and second corresponding surfaces from the respective first and second images, which surfaces delineate the same feature, such as a bone/tissue interface. This is done by extracting a stack of contours for each surface. The first surface is iteratively warped toward alignment with the second surface to arrive at a global translation vector and a set of residual surface distortion vectors. Volume distortion vectors, which are determined by applying a weighting function to the residual surface distortion vectors, are used to indicate the locations in the second volumetric image of voxel centers whose interpolated intensities are to be moved to lattice points. The weighting function includes a constant indicative of elastic stiffness of the second volume. The extraction of the first surface, surface warping, and volume distortion vector determination steps are repeated in successive iterations until a measure of misregistration between the volumetric images is less than a predetermined value.
The quality of this registration method is reduced, if the object comprises complex properties.